“Most importantly, the Court of Appeals did not find this to be reversible error, so it should have no impact on the verdicts,” the plaintiffs’ attorney added.
Because the plaintiffs do not have PCB testing data from the time the plaintiffs worked at the site, and the light fixtures containing the chemicals have since been removed, the plaintiffs relied on Coghlan to illustrate “exposure range” reflecting the possible airborne PCB concentrations during those timeframes. The company, meanwhile, has pointed to testing done at the site after remediation was completed showing no elevated levels.
The appellate panel’s majority, Judges Janet Chung and Linda Coburn, ruled out two of Coghlan’s three approaches for coming up with the range, finding them novel and not generally accepted by the scientific community: back-calculating potential air levels based on carpet samples that had been stored in plastic bags by the teachers and later tested for PCBs; and extrapolating historic levels based on data collected in a study of five New York schools before and after remediation.